Highways are very much an every-driver-for-themselves kind of place. While we hope the majority of people will do whatever they can to avoid accidents and not take silly risks, ultimately every individual has to watch out for their own hides.

But what if getting on the highway also meant joining a wireless mesh network consisting of all the cars around you? Cars could become a self-organizing entity, avoiding collisions and minimizing traffic congestion. The cars themselves would be smart enough to cooperate with each other.

"You can imagine in the future, you could enter the highway, mesh with five or six other vehicles around you and you caravan together," said Dan Rabinovitsj, senior VP of chipmaker Qualcomm Atheros's networking business unit. "You're essentially making sure you're not just keeping proper distance from the front and back, which a number of vehicles do today, but literally in 360 degrees. And of course passing along messages: there's a policeman up ahead, there's an accident up ahead, or there's a stoplight. All of these things are starting to intersect."

Rabinovitsj was speaking today as part of a Consumer Electronics Show panel on next-generation wireless technologies. The self-organizing cars he envisions aren't something on the market today, and there's no public timeline for when it might come to market. But cars, like everything else, are getting smarter, and the technology that could make what Rabinovitsj described possible is already being developed.

The 802.11p standard allowing data exchange between moving vehicles in the 5.9GHz band and a Department of Transportation project called dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) both play a role, Rabinovitsj said. "There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done, and anything to do with vehicle safety will require years of testing and such," he said. "But there's a considerable amount of work getting done right now. And all of the chipsets that we've developed have this enhanced DSRC capability, so we're basically ready to go. We can enable that functionality."

It will be complicated, noted Fanny Mlinarsky, founder and CTO of wireless testing firm octoScope. "DSRC itself is not a mesh. It's a broadcast, so it only reaches vehicles within range," she said. "Meshing requires a lot more sophistication. There's a routing aspect to it, relaying messages to other nodes. DSRC is much simpler."

The CES panelists were speaking in speculative tones, but that doesn't mean car manufacturers aren't already working on this. About 18 months ago, Ford Motor Company CTO and VP of Research Paul Mascarenas described a project to build a mesh network for cars.

An August 2011 article by Kevin Fitchard on Connected Planet said Ford was exploring the idea of a "constantly morphing mobile mesh network that helped drivers avoid accidents, identify traffic jams miles before they encounter them, and even act as a relay point for Internet access."

"What Ford envisions, Mascarenas said, is a high-powered, heavily encrypted Wi-Fi that establishes point-to-point connections between cars within a half-mile radius, "Fitchard wrote. "Those connections could be used to communicate vital information between vehicles, either triggering alerts to the driver or interpreted by the vehicle’s computer. An intelligent car slamming on its brakes could communicate to all of the vehicles behind it that it’s coming to rapid halt, giving the driver that much more warning that he too needs to hit the brakes."

Mesh networking, in which each connected device can route traffic to other devices on the network, is a hot research topic for businesses, Rabinovitsj said. Connected cars may be just one of many interesting applications to be developed using mesh networks in the coming years.

"Mesh has become an extremely important part of the enterprise on the Wi-Fi side, and a lot of our customers are innovating around this," he said.

You would really only have to care about the car(s) in your immediate vicinity, maybe 4 or 5 car lengths in any particular direction. Thats enough fine detail for this to work. 10 if you want to be REALLY safe.

Outside of that, longer distances can provide information (such as an accident a couple of miles down the road), but wouldnt need to be so precise in terms of specific car positioning.

Kind of like Google Maps where the wider view only shows the main roads, but closer to the ground gets you more details.

I don't know how many times I've wished people would learn how to merge properly. So many traffic jams are caused when lanes merge due to construction or because the road narrows. If each car knew where it was in relation to each other, cars could more easily zipper themselves together without so many dead stops.

It's a really cool idea. But the security aspects worry me -- if you're a bored university student, surely you're going to try spoofing information from your car just for kicks. "Look guys, I click this, and Bingo! Everyone around us thinks we're a road train*! And I click this and everyone thinks we're about to change lanes, yes all of them. Heh! So much space around us."

Heavily encrypted, meh. Just need some keys to leak from a manufacturer and it's on for everyone. Or it'll get cracked. Eventually you'll be able to buy little gizmos from ebay for 20 bucks: "Traffic Light Prioritoriser: Be Your Own Emergency Services Vehicle**"

"There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done, and anything to do with vehicle safety will require years of testing and such,"

Words to inspire confidence, and stuff!

On topic: I'm not excited about having the car do more driving for me...I generally enjoy driving, and don't like most of the automated niceties that are becoming more and more common. I don't use the automated headlights on my car (I'm not so lazy that I can't flip a switch if it's dark outside, thank-you-very-much). I prefer a manual transmission. The idea of a car taking over more and more of the trip makes me worry about how boring future trips will be.

On the other hand, if it gets rid of traffic jams, it might be worth it......

I don't know how many times I've wished people would learn how to merge properly. So many traffic jams are caused when lanes merge due to construction or because the road narrows. If each car knew where it was in relation to each other, cars could more easily zipper themselves together without so many dead stops.

90% of folks don't even have their SIDE VIEW mirrors set correctly. And you expect them to merge correctly??

There is no such thing as a blind spot on a passenger vehicle. If you have one, your mirrors are set incorrectly. Push them out further so you can see the lanes to your SIDE.

On topic.... I wish the government would heavily subsidize the research in this area as well as 'self driving' cars along the lines of Google's project. The return on investment would be tremendous in reduced traffic, better safety, less pollution, and likely better health as stress levels reduce.

"There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done, and anything to do with vehicle safety will require years of testing and such,"

Words to inspire confidence, and stuff!

On topic: I'm not excited about having the car do more driving for me...I generally enjoy driving, and don't like most of the automated niceties that are becoming more and more common. I don't use the automated headlights on my car (I'm not so lazy that I can't flip a switch if it's dark outside, thank-you-very-much). I prefer a manual transmission. The idea of a car taking over more and more of the trip makes me worry about how boring future trips will be.

On the other hand, if it gets rid of traffic jams, it might be worth it......

Normally I don't comment on this sort of thing, and maybe it's just the cold in me, but you sound like one of those "get off my lawn!" type of people.

In particular, automatic headlights. My memory is sometimes rather poor and I can't be effed having to remember to turn them on. (Mind you, this particular case was because I was driving a rental and didn't realize the thing didn't have automatic lights.) I once drove about a mile in the dark before I hit an on-ramp and realized it was completely black. This is mere convenience and your words make it seem like this is an evil piece of technology.

Manual transmission, some people prefer it. I can't drive stick but I can appreciate someone who likes to control their engine a little more closely.

Personally, I first had the idea of this kind of thing maybe a few years ago and I would love to see this come to fruition. How far can you take this? Give every single window in the car a heads up display with eye-tracking. Look out the window and let your gaze focus on a car accident: your car notices your gaze, warns you to face forward and speed up again, and shows you basic info about the accident so you stop fucking rubbernecking. Or, when you drive through construction, something pops up telling you how many days to completion and what's being done. Or, one car a few miles behind you catches wind of an ambulance in the area and it filters up the line and warns you that it's coming. If you don't get the hell out of the way, the car negotiates with the cars around you to let the ambulance pass.

If you like to drive yourself - better do it while you can. Not only with this happen - but it will be mandated. Driving in the future will be more like boarding a personal train - there will be a TON more people on the road all moving in coordination.

Heavily encrypted, meh. Just need some keys to leak from a manufacturer and it's on for everyone. Or it'll get cracked. Eventually you'll be able to buy little gizmos from ebay for 20 bucks: "Traffic Light Prioritoriser: Be Your Own Emergency Services Vehicle**"

You mean like this? http://www.themirt.com/ I don't see any on Ebay, probably because it's illegal, but it's certainly possible already.

Spoofing your system will probably be possible, sure. There may be legal consequences of doing so, and the actual benefit depends somewhat on how the system works. Personally, I would design it with limited trust.

There is already a precedent for this sort of thing - see TCAS which aircraft use. Cars have a major advantage which is they can just stop if things are getting too hairy, while aircraft have to continue flying.

I expect in 30-40 years driverless cars will be to me like computers are to those of advanced age today. I just can't fathom taking my hands off the wheel and foot off the brake and expecting everything to end up completely ok, with the added bonus of being at my destination in record time.

On that note I have to wonder if requiring "manual overrides" will just make the problem worse, rather than better. A computer is mostly better at driving a vehicle than I am, but at the same time I still react instinctively to certain events. I can't even sit in a friends/relatives vehicle and not be backseat "driving"/observing the whole time. Suppressing that instinct and letting the computer handle it would take nerves of steel.

The other real main problem is that a transition to wireless automated cars is going to be very slow and very gradual, basically occuring only when people decide to update their vehicles with a new model. The advanced automated ones have to accomodate varying levels of automation and human unpredictability every step of the way. That's not a hurdle I want to be tasked with overcoming, or even dealing with.

like koolrap, I'm very concerned about the posibilities of spoofing. Even if you imagine a control chip from a known source with an uncrackable key being placed in every car to allow it to access this (if) then all a truely dedicated malicious 3rd party has to do is buy a car and chop it down. Send that false information and there's your naughtiness.

The only way I can see out of it is to treat these messages like a radio traffic broadcast - informative for a self controlled entity, but not dictating behaviour. Always trust the evidence you can see rather than what you're told.

Spoofing can be prevented, but in a difficult manner. Cars would need to be provided with their own sensors to validate the information they're receiving via network about the cars around them. However, that would also provide an extra layer of safety in case the network ever went down, so it would be a good move overall.

I was thinking the same thing a time ago. Just a way for say P2P a caravan of cars behind a truck.

In real life you can use the vaccum of the truck but is very risky... but if a wireless system could ask the truck for permisson to "free load" the truck could signal obtacles or whatever is happening up front.

Behind the car in question would be other cars making a roadway almost a nascar circuit, lol.

Would drasticaly reduce fuel consumption. In the city the benefit could be better traffic management,

"There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done, and anything to do with vehicle safety will require years of testing and such,"

Words to inspire confidence, and stuff!

On topic: I'm not excited about having the car do more driving for me...I generally enjoy driving, and don't like most of the automated niceties that are becoming more and more common. I don't use the automated headlights on my car (I'm not so lazy that I can't flip a switch if it's dark outside, thank-you-very-much). I prefer a manual transmission. The idea of a car taking over more and more of the trip makes me worry about how boring future trips will be.

On the other hand, if it gets rid of traffic jams, it might be worth it......

I do have to ask what difference does it make whether you flip the headlights on yourself or the car does it.

Even to the most hardcore car enthusiast headlight automation really isn't a pressing issue.

If anything it prevents people from driving around with just their parking lights on.

Meh. I'll wait until there's a tangible product before rendering my opinion. As described, it sounds great, but the security vulnerabilities are seriously scary . It could be a new type of road terrorism/malware, a malicious application that infects your car's computer and tells it to ignore stop commands from other vehicles, send false stop commands or other information, etc.

I don't think people understand that as a world community, we REALLY need to get deadly serious about technology security before anything like this will be safe. Current malware and security vulnerabilities, for the most part, are just an inconvenience.

If you get a worm or virus, your computer is slow or may need to be reformatted. If we go a little worse-case scenario, your credit card number gets lifted and you have to deal with fraudulent charges. In the case of a DDoS attack, you can't check your bank account online or you can't look at your favorite webcomic. In a grid-enabled car, in a grid enabled society, where drivers have become much too reliant on the car to warn them if a stop is coming or to make an emergency stop if necessary, malware slowing down the car's system or telling it to ignore stop commands could very easily be fatal.

I'm not dissing the technology, and I would love to see it come to fruition, but the security portion needs to be addressed in a very serious and robust way. Judging from the stories of powergrid and infrastructure devices with security vulnerabilities and back doors galore, I can't help but think securing this type of system may be out of the realm of possibility... for now, in this current technology landscape, at least.

If you like to drive yourself - better do it while you can. Not only with this happen - but it will be mandated. Driving in the future will be more like boarding a personal train - there will be a TON more people on the road all moving in coordination.

And we will all be stuck with driving at the same speed as the old fart in the Buick ( or Toyota)

There is no such thing as a blind spot on a passenger vehicle. If you have one, your mirrors are set incorrectly. Push them out further so you can see the lanes to your SIDE.

False. side view mirrors on most new passenger cars are so small as to be virtually useless. In addition, the side windows are much smaller and the A and B pillars much larger than in previous years, so looking over your shoulder doesn't do much good either. If this trend continues, radar will be required, or at least wide-angle side-view cameras, since the driver cannot physically see cars around him.

I often imagine that this will be one of those technological shifts that one day I may be telling my grandchildren how I used to drive cars manually. There are so many positives to this possibility. The elimination of human error (and more so, arrogance), traffic, and the liberty of older and disabled people to get around more easily.

The difficult part won't be the technology, it'll be the paradigm shift needed to convince people that they don't need to manually drive anymore.

There is no such thing as a blind spot on a passenger vehicle. If you have one, your mirrors are set incorrectly. Push them out further so you can see the lanes to your SIDE.

False. side view mirrors on most new passenger cars are so small as to be virtually useless. In addition, the side windows are much smaller and the A and B pillars much larger than in previous years, so looking over your shoulder doesn't do much good either. If this trend continues, radar will be required, or at least wide-angle side-view cameras, since the driver cannot physically see cars around him.

Hopefully the trend of shrinking windows will end. It's a matter of style, and history shows us that any style eventually looks stupid and dated. Window visibility was a big factor last time I bought a car, I don't understand why more people don't care about it.

"In the world, a 100 years in the future, no one drives cars — instead, computer-controlled, electrically powered "AI cars" automatically take you where you want to go. However, when the AI cars mysteriously start to run amok, an organization called eX-Driver is established to figure out why.

Although no one in this world knows how to drive, there are some people, who seem to have an instinctive ability to drive old-fashioned, gasoline-powered cars, thus earning an eX licence. Two friends — Risa, a straightforward and cheerful girl, and Rona, a calm and easygoing type — already keep the roads safe as professional eX-Drivers."

"There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done, and anything to do with vehicle safety will require years of testing and such,"

Words to inspire confidence, and stuff!

On topic: I'm not excited about having the car do more driving for me...I generally enjoy driving, and don't like most of the automated niceties that are becoming more and more common. I don't use the automated headlights on my car (I'm not so lazy that I can't flip a switch if it's dark outside, thank-you-very-much). I prefer a manual transmission. The idea of a car taking over more and more of the trip makes me worry about how boring future trips will be.

On the other hand, if it gets rid of traffic jams, it might be worth it......

I do have to ask what difference does it make whether you flip the headlights on yourself or the car does it.

Even to the most hardcore car enthusiast headlight automation really isn't a pressing issue.

If anything it prevents people from driving around with just their parking lights on.

The headlights are just a common example of a feature that I don't find particularly compelling. I don't use cruise control either. My vehicle isn't new enough to talk about some of the "cooler" things that the luxury models have been doing recently, i.e. automated parallel parking.

Another poster mentioned that it came off as a sort of "get off my lawn!" type of comment. I can see how that is true, but I wasn't really going for that impression. My point is that as more of these automated systems get added to the car, the action of driving takes less thinking. On one hand, it is great, because there are already too many people on the road who are not thinking while they are driving, so anything that we can do to lower the bar is good and makes the road safer for everyone. On the other hand, this is a sort of bowdlerization movement that can remove some of the enjoyment from those of us who are engaged in what we are doing and enjoy the activity.

Ultimately, I expect that these systems will take over and a lot of our daily commute will be automated. For safety reasons, this is probably ultimately a good thing. But, I wonder what get's automated next.

This is the part I like: "The collaborative mesh network could even be used as a mobile broadband alternative to the wide area cellular network. Offload points on the roadside would be used to backhaul traffic to the Internet, but the cars themselves—so long as they all remained a half mile from one another—could pass a Netflix movie stream or a video call down the highway to the vehicle requesting it. " Finally, some competition to the big telecoms! Of course, it'd suck if a crash happened because too many people were torrenting the combined seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

We can't even get the locals to time the traffic lights. You somehow think they will coordinate them to self-driving cars? We would be better off if they just turned them off outside of rush hours instead of changing the timing to slow up traffic even more (outside rush hour the lights are all timed so you can make several in a row....during rush hour and at the same speed you can't make ANY of them).

As for more automation in the car; no thanks. I don't want automatic headlights; hell, i don't even want daytime running lights. If you can't see me, you shouldn't be out driving.

Regarding the side mirrors, small windows, increased post sizes.....talk to your government about all their "safety" regulations that are imposed on the automakers. There's your prime culprit....

These are both current model year, so regulations are a non-issue in any differences. The RAV4 has a much more dramatically rising midline than the Forester, making the height of the back windows much smaller. And there's also a stylistic choice about the shape of the window. The rear panel side window on the RAV4 is basically vestigial, whereas the same window on the Forester is usable.

I imagine I could find other comparisons, but I picked these two because they were the two cars I was choosing between last time I bought a car. They are the same class of vehicle and it's realistic to think a customer might be choosing between them. I picked the Forester. Visibility was a major factor.

One thing I'd like to see is a tagging/voting system where you can alert other drivers around you to a bad driver. If you witness someone changing lanes rapidly, tailgating, etc, you could tag the car in question and if others witness the same behavior they can vote in agreement. If enough votes are garnered, you can have a message sent to the nearest patrol car to be on the lookout. Obviously the data would have to expire after a certain amount of time/ miles driven so as to avoid abuse or blacklisting. This is also assuming it cannot be spoofed. I don't think it should be admissible in court, either. The cop should have to witness the infraction to be able to ticket the offender.

There is already a precedent for this sort of thing - see TCAS which aircraft use. Cars have a major advantage which is they can just stop if things are getting too hairy, while aircraft have to continue flying.

TCAS is advisory only, although one is STRONGLY advised to follow its warnings to keep metal from bending. With cars and autoroads the system would have to go from passive to active to be of any use. We have passive systems now e.g: adaptive cruise control and lane departure warning but they would need to be massively upgraded to be of use in ways the article implies. Also, cars would have to broadcast their abilities into the mesh so that, say, in case car A initiates a panic stop, car B would have to maintain sufficient distance behind so as to compensate for better or worse braking systems, tires, etc.

As far as those of us who enjoy playing with our toys, only vehicles capable of auto driving, and those that actually have the system armed would be allowed into the autoroads. The rest of us will have to find some nice empty country road.

Hopefully the trend of shrinking windows will end. It's a matter of style, and history shows us that any style eventually looks stupid and dated. Window visibility was a big factor last time I bought a car, I don't understand why more people don't care about it.

They do. That's one reason why more people drive SUVs instead of cars. It pisses me off as a car driver as I can't see around them. Also, it appears that most SUVs do not come with turn signals.

The other real main problem is that a transition to wireless automated cars is going to be very slow and very gradual, basically occuring only when people decide to update their vehicles with a new model. The advanced automated ones have to accomodate varying levels of automation and human unpredictability every step of the way. That's not a hurdle I want to be tasked with overcoming, or even dealing with.

None of us alive today will see this in widespread use (unless lifespans increase dramatically). It took 23 years from "We are going to require the sale of unleaded gasoline" (1972) to "Leaded gasoline is only available for offroad use" (1995). And that was only after decades of "Is lead really all that dangerous?" How long will the change from "Individuals must be incontrol of their vehicles at all times" to "Individuals must surrender control of their vehicles whenever the mesh says it's taking over?"

Sure, you can trust that car even though you can't see it, but what about that 2012 Forrester that the computer cant "see?"

I'm also firmly in the "let me control my car" camp - I drive a stick, and ride a motorcycle. I'd love to see how the mesh deals with bikes.

I also wonder about simpler pranks. I'm the third car in a mesh of 15. What happens to the mesh when I do a brake check? Are the systems fast enough that I don't get rear-ended? Does that mean the people in the rest of the mesh cars get whiplash? Or wear their coffee?

Self-driving cars are cool in concept, and mesh-traffic might be great in very high-concentration traffic areas, but I'm with Will Smith: let me drive my own damn car.

Also blind-spots do exist. You can eliminate MOST between rear/side mirrors, but there are still blind spots. Go drive a 200x New Beetle, particularly the convertible, and come back and tell me there isn't a blind spot on that car.

As for this...it's inevitable. We'll eventually never drive ourselves. It'll all be controlled inputs. The only control you'll have will be the destination and the route. The only benefit would be that auto-insurance would drastically drop, and I can sleep a little bit longer on the way to work. After all, accidents and traffic jams are just faults of human error.